“A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.

Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes.

I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

Outside the arch, always there seemed another arch. And beyond the remotest echo, a silence.

Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.

Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off the box when it happens to sit there?

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

School was the unhappiest time of my life and the worst trick it ever played on me was to pretend that it was the world in miniature. For it hindered me from discovering how lovely and delightful and kind the world can be, and how much of it is intelligible.

Give, do not lend; after death who will thank you?

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?

It is easy to sympathize at a distance,’ said an old gentleman with a beard. ‘I value more the kind word that is spoken close to my ear.

One grows accustomed to being praised, or being blamed, or being advised, but it is unusual to be understood.

She had been so wicked that in all her life she had done only one good deed-given an onion to a beggar. So she went to hell. As she lay in torment she saw the onion, lowered down from heaven by an angel. She caught hold of it. He began to pull her up.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.